Google Friends Newsletter - June 2011

POWER TIP

Voice Search on Desktop

You can now speak your web searches instead of typing them by clicking on the microphone icon on the right side of the search box. This can be particularly useful for hard-to-spell searches like [spaghetti with bolognese sauce] or complex searches like [translate to spanish where can I buy a hamburger]. Voice Search is currently available for Chrome users in U.S. English only.http://www.google.com/insidesearch/voicesearch.html

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NEW PRODUCTS & UPDATES

Search by Image

You now have the option of searching with a photo instead of words at images.google.com. Click the camera icon in the search box and upload a photo from your computer or paste the URL of an image from the web. You can also drag and drop pictures from websites or your computer into the search box. You'll get relevant results about your image as well as similar images or the same image in different sizes or resolutions.http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html

Keeping track of all the locations you care about and memorizing which places you starred or rated isn't easy. To help, we released the new My Places tab on Google Maps, which helps you quickly view and interact with your saved maps, starred locations and rated businesses. The My Places tab replaces the My Maps tab in the Google Maps toolbar.http://maps.google.com/maps/myplaces

Inside Search

We recently launched Inside Search, a one-stop shop for all search- related features, tips and tricks. Whether you're a beginner to web search or a search master, you'll find all the search shortcuts you need under the Features section of the site. You can also use the under-the-hood section to get a look at the technology behind Google Search. There are interactive diagrams with information on how far every query has to travel to get an answer back to you, how often we run experiments (we ran over 6000 in 2010 alone), how much time has gone into developing the algorithm and more.http://www.google.com/insidesearch/